Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The photo-taking-impairment effect refers to the detrimental impact photo taking has on one's memory for the photographed object. We explored the role of two mechanisms that have been said to underlie the effect, namely offloading and attentional disengagement. In this online study 107 undergraduate students were shown 3x5 paintings and were instructed to simply observe them, take a picture that would be available for later usage, or take a picture and delete it. Afterwards, they were presented with a visual details multiple-choice test. It was expected that if attentional disengagement was the mechanism underlying the photo-taking-impairment effect, then the effect would not be present in the current study. This expectation was due to the non-distracting nature of the photo taking task that was used in the study. The results were in line with the expectations and did not indicate the presence of the photo-taking-impairment effect. Consequentially, it supported the hypothesis that attentional disengagement, rather than offloading, is the mechanism underlying this effect.